


what you lose at war

by Tieleen



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dragons, Gen, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-06-14
Updated: 2005-06-14
Packaged: 2017-11-07 18:06:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/433896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tieleen/pseuds/Tieleen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dragon-rider universe.</p><p> </p><p>And she hates him just for a moment, just briefly, for looking at all this loveliness and seeing only war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what you lose at war

“Look at this,” she shouts over the wind, slick scales under her skin and loose arms around her waist and the whole of creation beneath her, “Isn’t it amazing?”

“It’s beautiful,” he says, and the wind almost takes the words but not quite, “but it’s also wasting our time. We should’ve taken the straightest line to base.” And she hates him just for a moment, just briefly, for looking at all this loveliness and seeing only war.

It’s a month before she sees that burned down farm house, the bodies strewn in the yard, the smallness of the limbs. It’s a month before she understands, really understands, not just in word and old song, how everything is intricately tied together. And she almost resents him, then, because he knew before she had, because she knows now and perhaps she had never wanted to. But then, so many things are lost at war.

It’s years before she hears the stories, sees the pictures of what her own side had done, before she wonders if all the directions she had turned her dragon really were justified by that one, smoking ruin. Years before she finds that what she had been fighting for all along is people, not land and not power but people, and what people do at war are sometimes things that shouldn’t be fought for. And sometimes there must still be fighting.

Perhaps this is why she takes such a long time to learn this, in the end, this final lesson -- final lesson? Just as each and every one of them had been final -- the one that does not solve anything, in the end. Because all of her answers had come costing so dearly, and it’s like a back handed slap, that in the end she finds there really had only been questions all along.


End file.
